Matthew Arnold

Arnold, Matthew,

1822–88, English poet and critic, son of the educator Dr. Thomas ArnoldArnold, Thomas,1795–1842, English educator, b. Isle of Wight, educated at Winchester school and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1815 to 1819, was ordained deacon in 1818, and was from 1827 to 1842 headmaster of Rugby.....Click the link for more information..

Arnold was educated at Rugby; graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1844; and was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in 1845. In 1851, after a period as secretary to the 3d marquess of Lansdowne, Arnold was appointed inspector of schools, a position he held until 1886, two years before his death. During his tenure he went on a number of missions to European schools. He was impressed with some educational systems on the Continent—most particularly the concept of state-regulated secondary education—and wrote several works about them.

His first volume of poems, The Strayed Reveller, appeared in 1849; it was followed by Empedocles on Etna (1852). Dissatisfied with both works, he withdrew them from circulation. Poems (1853) contained verse from the earlier volumes as well as new poems, including "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Sohrab and Rustum." Poems: Second Series appeared in 1855 and was followed by Merope: A Tragedy (1858) and New Poems (1867); the latter volume included "Thyrsis," his famous elegy on Arthur Hugh CloughClough, Arthur Hugh, 1819–61, English poet. He was educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, where he became friends with Matthew Arnold. After graduation (1841) he was fellow and tutor of Oriel College until 1848 when he resigned......Click the link for more information..

Arnold's verse is characterized by restraint, directness, and symmetry. Though he believed that poetry should be objective, his verse exemplifies the romantic pessimism of the 19th cent., an age torn between science and religion. His feelings of spiritual isolation are reflected in such poems as "Dover Beach" and "Isolation: To Marguerite."

Matthew Arnold was also one of the most important literary critics of his age. From 1857 to 1867 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; during this time he wrote his first books of criticism, including On Translating Homer (1861), Essays in Criticism (1865; Ser. 2, 1888), and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). In Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Friendship's Garland (1871) he widened his field to include social criticism. Arnold's interest in religion resulted in St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). In the 1880s he gave several lectures in the United States, which were published as Discourses in America (1885).

Arnold was the apostle of a new culture, one that would pursue perfection through a knowledge and understanding of the best that has been thought and said in the world. He attacked the taste and manners of 19th-century English society, particularly as displayed by the "Philistines," the narrow and provincial middle class. Strongly believing that the welfare of a nation is contingent upon its intellectual life, he proclaimed that intellectual life is best served by an unrestricted, objective criticism that is free from personal, political, and practical considerations.

Arnold, Matthew

Born Dec. 24, 1822, in Laleham, Middlesex; died Apr. 15, 1888, in Liverpool. English poet, educator, and art critic.

Arnold made his debut with such poems as “Tristram and Iseult,” “Balder Dead,” “Empedocles on Etna,” and “Sohrab and Rustum.” As a critic he wrote about the hostility of bourgeois reality to art (the collection Culture and Anarchy, 1869; the book Literature and Dogma, 1873). In his essays he contrasted the prosaic thought of the bourgeois common man to the high, educative aim of literature, which is filled with the ideas of beauty, truth, and good. Arnold was one of the first in England to recognize the greatness of L. N. Tolstoy as a realist critical of those in power (the article “Count Leo Tolstoy,” 1887). Tolstoy, in his turn, feeling that Arnold was a like-minded thinker, included excerpts of Arnold’s works in his own Circle of Reading. Arnold’s most important works are collected in the book Essays in Criticism (series 1–2, 1865, 1888).

Matthew Arnold, a disciple of Wordsworth and Goethe, and "the one major Victorian writer of whom it can be said without metaphor that he was nurtured in the Wordsworthian presence" (Gill 174), asks England and Europe to remember his mentor in his celebrated "Memorial Verses" read at Wordsworth's graveside: "Ah

because their [Homer, Dante] poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and the effect of these is not really transferable" (Matthew Arnold, "Isaiah of Jerusalem," in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed.

In a sense, Quart is a descendant of a tradition begun in the mid-19th century by Marx and Engels on the left and Matthew Arnold on the right, the soi-disant voice in the moral wilderness excoriating the base appetites of an emerging commercial culture.

Such an education exposes students not only to what Matthew Arnold famously Termed "the best that has been thought and said" but also develops in them a valuable form of critical consciousness that is difficult to acquire elsewhere in contemporary American society.

Trilling thought he detected the same expectations in the great liberal writers of nineteenth-century Britain, such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, with whom he began his career as a college professor and literary critic.

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